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The Restoration of James Madison's Montpelier

by Edward A. Chappell

Editor's note: The architectural restoration of Montpelier, the rural Virginia Piedmont home of James and Dolley Madison, is among the most complex and fascinating of our generation. It raises issues about preservation and presentation of historic buildings, sets a standard for the capture and synthesis of data, and offers a new glimpse of the Madisons' private lives.

James Madison Sr. built the Georgian house at Montpelier about 1760. His son expanded it for himself and Dolley Madison, and added a portico about 1797. As president, the younger Madison recast the center and added private wings at the ends. William duPont remodeled and enlarged the house in 1901.

Montpelier had
grown into an almost incomprehensible behemoth. The Madisons twice expanded it.
There were mid- and late nineteenth-century alterations. And when the wealthy
William duPont Sr. bought the home in 1901, he enlarged it from thirty-six
rooms above the cellar to 104. He also raised more than 100 structures on the grounds,
including a general store. Two of the house's first-floor spaces remained in
their Madison-era form.

The
National Trust for Historic Preservation, which in 1984 became Montpelier's
ninth owner, asked Colonial Williamsburg's architectural research department in
1997 for help understanding how the house had evolved, and how, renovation to
renovation, it had looked.

Scholars
and architects had studied Montpelier three times since 1977. The trust wrote a
report that included records of nineteenth-century builders and visitors. But a
broad understanding of Montpelier was elusive until Colonial Williamsburg
architectural historians began investigations. Looking for evidence, they,
among other things, made incisions through twentieth-century plaster to see the
fabric behind. The exploration showed Montpelier comparable to Mount Vernon and
Monticello in the complexity and personality of its changing form, though much
of its early finish seemed lost.

Funds
being limited and there being no rush, Colonial Williamsburg staff spent a
little more than three weeks at Montpelier during the next four years. By 2001,
Willie Graham, Mark R. Wenger, Carl Lounsbury, and I, expanding on earlier
work, developed a physical history of the house.

James Madison's
father built the original two-story brick Georgian house about 1760, and moved
his family a half-mile from a smaller wooden dwelling called Mount Pleasant.
Their new home had formal, symmetrical facades, with five vertical rows of
openings on the face and three on the rear, including doors into opposite ends
of a central passage. Rooms were stacked two deep. The builders put a parlor
and dining room at the front. These two reception rooms with carved English red
sandstone mantels were the best finished spaces. A narrow stair was enclosed
between the passage and a rear bedchamber. Slaves prepared meals in a separate
kitchen and, perhaps through the rear bedchamber, carried them to the dining
room.

In
1797, retiring from Congress, Madison moved to Montpelier, and for himself and
wife, Dolley Payne Madison, grafted a second residence onto the side of his
parents' house. The addition looked and functioned much like an urban rowhouse
of the era, with a side stair passage providing access to two rooms on each
floor. We suspect there were a parlor and dining room downstairs, and
bedchambers upstairs. Workers cooked food in a separate kitchen and brought it
up through a cellar stair. There was no connection between the young peoples'
and the parents' quarters. There was, in Wenger's words, "a fire wall between
the generations."

Plans show how James Madison added a separate household to the left of his parents' house, then recast the center to create a drawing room and added bedroom wings. William duPont changed all but the two central spaces.

The
arrangement required them to walk outside to visit next door. Madison resolved
this by building a large portico with four Tuscan columns carrying a pediment
that sheltered both front doors. Though oddly proportioned, it gave a central
focus to the house and masked the unconventional organization of openings.
Light colored, the porch looked handsome against the red brick walls. But the
portico blocked much of the view from the best rooms upstairs, so the retired
congressman had to sit or lean over to see the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In
1809, the year after he was elected president and eight years after his
father's death, Madison turned the house into a proper seat for a chief
executive, his wife, and mother. The change had more to do with shifting
functions than size, though it included two wings. Physical evidence and the
accounts of builders James Dinsmore and John Neilson taught us much about the
construction.

This
second remodeling joined the two parts of the house, maintaining separate
quarters for the generations. The parlor and a left-hand chamber were gutted to
create an entry lobby in front of a substantial drawing room—a reception space
finished with classical woodwork, and furnished with patriotic and pedagogical
art. Thomas Jefferson, Madison's architecturally energetic mentor, recommended
making the room more expansive by raising the ceiling and rebuilding the rear
masonry wall to create a bow. Madison quietly resisted; the cost and
inconvenience were prohibitive.

Guests
could enter the lobby from the porch through a new central doorway surrounded
by glass. Family or servants would escort them into the drawing room or one of
the older passages—the widow Nelly Madison's on the right or the president and
his wife's on the left. Beyond were the widow's rooms, or the couple's dining
room on the opposite side. Nelly Madison lost little space in the remodeling
and no status, but her spaces were old-fashioned compared to the stylish
drawing room and the quarters to the left.

The
remodeled house can be read as an accommodation for the women, as well as the
president. Dinsmore and Neilson built two single-story wings in 1809-12,
containing the house's most refined private spaces, and making it thirteen bays
long. On the right, Nelly Madison walked from her receiving room through a dark
closet and lobby into a large new bedroom. On the left, the couple walked from
its dining room through an equally dark lobby to a comparable bedroom. By 1832,
Dolley Madison occupied the left wing alone, and the ailing ex-president stayed
in their old rear room, behind the dining room.

There
were new cellar kitchens, directly below Nelly and Dolley Madison's bedrooms,
with access up stairs from open cellar passages to the lobbies connecting both
pairs of bedroom and dining room. Clay insulation was packed between the floor
joists against the kitchens' sounds and smells. No other floors were so
insulated. The wings were covered with railed decks, and the Madisons and their
guests could reach at least the left one from the second story.

Later
nineteenth-century remodelings attempted to make the portico more academic and
monumental by recessing the porch floor and carrying the masonry columns to the
ground. More sensible pitched roofs were built over the wings. A grandiose
marble mantel replaced the plainer Roman one in the drawing room, and walls
were hung with colorful papers.

Marion Scott created her modern "Red Room" from Nelly Madison's bedroom. Nelly Madison entered her private wing through the small doorway to the left of a ca. 1760 stone mantel, in what became the duPont smoking room.

At the turn of the century, duPont bought Montpelier for
his and his wife Anna duPont's principal residence. He set about, without much
apparent help from architects, remaking it into an estate with a baronial
country house. He paid some respect to the perceived style of the house,
especially its neoclassical woodwork, but recast its arrangement.

On
the first floor, the 1809-12 lobby and drawing room retained their shapes,
though doorways were altered and the circulation pattern changed. James and
Dolley Madison's dining room was combined with part of their stair passage to
become a billiard room. Her bedroom became a secondary kitchen and service
corridor. Nelly Madison's reception room was expanded for a smoking room. Three
new reception rooms with European neoclassical finish were created at the right
end of the house, one of them occupying Nelly Madison's 1809-12 wing. Both
wings were raised to two stories and extended in an asymmetrical composition.
The enlarged portico was retained to help clarify the intended center of the
house.

Daughter
Marion duPont inherited use of the property in 1928, and lived there until her
death in 1983. A horsewoman, she married cowboy actor Randolph Scott in 1936,
and the couple made Nelly Madison's cellar kitchen into an exercise room for
him. Upstairs, she created the "Red Room," a modernist lounge with chrome and
white-trimmed red sofas, an Art Deco glass fireplace, and hundreds of photos of
her prize-winning horses and jockeys. It replaced her parents' Empire drawing
room and took the full main floor of Nelly Madison's wing.

Marion Scott
bequeathed Montpelier to the National Trust with a wish for its Madison-era
restoration. Short of operating funds, a series of directors maintained and
presented the property to small numbers of visitors. Staff struggled to explain
Madison's Montpelier in what was a 1901 country house with its furnishings
removed.

In
2000, the Montpelier Foundation became steward of the property. That year,
trust president Richard Moe and the new foundation president Michael Quinn
began discussing restoration with the executors of philanthropist Paul Mellon's
estate. They paid for nine months of architectural and archaeological
exploration and a feasibility study. Quinn assembled a research team led by
Colonial Williamsburg staff, primarily Wenger and Myron Stachiw, with help from
Willie Graham, Peter Sandbeck, and others. Joining them were Montpelier
staffers John Jeanes, Ann Miller, and Alfredo Maul. The architectural firm
Mesick, Cohen, Wilson, and Baker developed a restoration schedule and cost
estimates.

Mellon
funding accelerated investigations. More attention was turned on the building
in a week than we had given it in a year. By 2002, the team had learned much
and developed an expandable approach to recording every layer in every small
exploration through the strata of paint, plaster, and woodwork in all the
Madison spaces.

The
restoration implications of the discoveries were small and large. It was known
that the 1809-12 drawing room opened into the circa 1760 passage. The
connection was a doorway between James Madison's new reception space and his
mother's apartments, a doorway closed in 1901. Earlier investigation found
edges of the opening, but nothing about its form. Wenger and Stachiw peeled off
layers of wallpaper and plaster above, and Stachiw found a thin dark line left
by a painter who had inadvertently marked the outline of the pediment installed
by Dinsmore and Neilson. The reused paneled door and parts of the frame were
found elsewhere. So the shape of the pediment as well as color of the trim and
door was established for the best room in the house.

The front door opens into a lobby giving access to the apartments of both generations.

It
was long believed that Madison stuccoed the house when he added the wings. The
explorations in 2001 uncovered evidence that the brickwork remained exposed
after Madison's death, probably until about 1858. This was sobering because it
meant removal of all the stucco from the brickwork of all three phases, much of
which was damaged, to fulfill Marion Scott's wish.

Reporting
such findings in ten volumes, the team built a case that much more could be
learned about the state of the house when James, Dolley, and Nelly Madison
lived there—enough for a restoration more accurate than imagined.

Whether to restore Montpelier at all was much debated.
Since the 1960s, most architectural historians have favored a cautious,
antiscrape approach to most historic buildings. Preserving layers of change
lets buildings tell more complex stories, and retain the character they have
developed—while avoiding the guesswork any restoration includes. Restorations
have often left important buildings less evocative than they were before the
scraping.

The
Montpelier Foundation made the more dangerous and exciting choice to restore
the house to the period between 1815 and Madison's death in 1836. Mellon funds
are to pay for most of the restoration. The foundation is to raise more for furnishings
and some construction. The completion date is 2008. Movable pieces of the
duPont's neoclassical reception rooms and the Red Room are to be reassembled
where the family is presented elsewhere on the property.

The lobby looks toward the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond the fields of the estate.

The
next step was a full recording of the duPont additions, followed by demolition
that revealed much Madison material salvaged in 1901. Though we knew about flat
decks over the 1809-12 wings, we could only guess how these parts were roofed.
Removal of duPont bathroom tiles showed the outline of small parallel rooflets,
like those at Jefferson's Monticello. Distinctively shaped joists used to frame
these roofs were found in duPont additions to the bowling alley.

A
Philadelphia photography collection produced a nineteenth-century picture of James
Madison's bedroom, showing a narrow door, previously unknown, between his room
and Dolley Madison's dressing chamber in the wing. Maul and Wenger followed
this lead and found the door itself—the masonry opening and the six-panel leaf,
reused elsewhere in 1901. This reveals much about the private life of the
Madisons, suggesting that by 1812 the couple may have occupied separate
chambers joined by a private route, through dressing chamber and lobby, in
addition to a public route through the dining room.

Maul,
Wenger, and their colleagues have developed means of recording all such
evidence in digital drawings, photographs, and hybrids. The scope of their
information makes traditional drafting and photography techniques insufficient.
The group uses electronic methods for presenting, recording, and archiving the
data.

The
Montpelier team is setting a standard for architectural research. It indicates
how cautiously we should move when exploring or "restoring" the old family
house. Montpelier's state-of-the-art restoration may strengthen the argument
for leaving most historic buildings with their layers of change intact.

Edward A. Chappell, a long-time journal contributor and Colonial Williamsburg's Shirley and Richard
Roberts architectural historian, wrote "The New Architecture of Merchants Square" for the summer 2004 journal.